Real-Life Math
Decades ago, 382 kilograms of rock samples were gathered from the moon during various space missions. But did you know that even more moon rock has made its way to Earth?
As a planetary geologist, you and a team of international scientists are studying lunar meteorites. Lunar meteorites are rocks found on the Earth that were ejected from the moon during the impact of an asteroidal meteorite.
If the ejected moon rocks reach a speed of 2.38 kilometers per second, they can escape the moon's gravitational pull. Some of these ejected materials are caught by the Earth's gravitational pull. Others orbit the sun and eventually hit the Earth. One lunar meteorite hit the Earth 9 million years after it was ejected from the moon!
These moon rocks are valuable to research because they're ejected from many areas of the moon beyond where the space missions collected samples. As with other areas in planetary geology, math is used to study data gathered from these samples.
"Most people assume that the job is entirely based on math, but that doesn't need to be the case," says Jeff Klemaszewski. He is a researcher specializing in planetary geology. "Some areas, like mission planning, require less. Some areas do require extensive use of math skills, depending on the physics and math involved."
Because you're working with scientists around the world, you will need to convert the size of the lunar meteorites from metric to U.S. measurements.
Lunar Meteorite Mass:
The Dhofar lunar meteorite discovered in Libya: 148 grams
The Dar Al Gani lunar meteorite discovered in Oman: 1,425 grams
Questions:
- How many ounces is the Dhofar meteorite?
- How many ounces is the Dar Al Gani meteorite?
- What is the lunar escape velocity (2.38 kilometers per second) in miles per second?
Formulas:
1 gram = 0.0353 ounces
1 kilometer = 0.6214 miles